


Through The Dark (Places I Lose Myself)

by sottovoce81



Series: Traits Of An Empath [2]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: 5x Fic, Childhood Memories, Empath!Clint, Fix-It, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Pheels, Semi-Empath!Phil, Temporary Character Death, Their Love Is So
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-11 12:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sottovoce81/pseuds/sottovoce81
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5x Clint felt alone, and the one time someone felt with him.  Or in other words: how death has affected Clint Barton.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through The Dark (Places I Lose Myself)

**Author's Note:**

> When I realized this was going to be a 'verse, I had no idea what to title the 'verse. So I Googled "Empath" and the first thing that came up was a link to a site discussing 'traits of an empath.' It just rolled off the tongue... ;p So I took it home with me and kept it.
> 
> Also as you may have noticed in my first story of this ‘verse, my head!cannon for Clint’s parents (at least for this ‘verse) is very different from cannon. In this ‘verse, his dad was not an alcoholic or abusive, and his mom loved him like burning. So there. (Part of this is because I didn’t research his parents before writing “I’ll Follow You”.... haha) And part of it is me declaring that: hey, now that I think about it, if Clint was an empath and raised in an abusive home from birth, he would NOT BE OKAY. Probably ever. Even though he’s really not okay in my ‘verse either. Boy is broken. :( It’s a good thing there’s always a Phil Coulson to pick up the pieces. ;)
> 
> Warning #1: if you are not a fan of oc-killing sprees, this fic is not for you. Many oc's lost their lives to produce this fic.
> 
> Warning #2: If you haven't read the first fic of the 'verse, this will make only /some/ sense, but really not the last little bit. And also note, if you HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE you SHOULD (probably) NOT BE READING ANY Avengers fic at all right now, or else you have already been spoiled. Avengers 2012 Spoilers, this-a-way...! >>

 

**                 Intro: **

It wasn’t that Clint was unsettled by dead bodies...  Death was just the flipside of life.  It happened to everyone one day or another.  Just what happened.  The natural order of things.

It wasn’t even that Clint was scared of death himself.  He wasn’t exactly _un_ afraid of death either—he didn’t exactly go around tempting fate every other SHIELD mission (though Coulson might beg to differ).

It wasn’t really _death_ that bothered him.  The end of a life.  It was that damn lack of ... everything.  One minute there was a person there, with thoughts and feelings and life and movement and ... and the next it was just this shell casing for emptiness and lack.

There was nothing quite like that sudden stillness.

 

**                 One: **

Seven years old, he was in the back seat and his parents were up front.  His mom was turned around in her seat to look over her shoulder, talking to him about something.  He couldn’t remember exactly what she was saying because he had been too caught up in laughing at her for being silly.  She was grinning at him, and her grin— _god_ _when she smiled like that at him!_ —it was the clearest feeling of love and belonging and home that he would ever know.

His dad was humming with amusement listening to the two of them.  He wasn’t bothering to keep up, probably just enjoying the show.  He only had a bare second to see the other car coming, but his emotions spiked so painfully that Clint felt it in his own chest like a crushing weight.

And then the world tipped over when their car flipped.

His mom died on impact when the other car hit her passenger side door.  Clint didn’t realize until the car had stopped rolling (it flipped three times) that she was gone.  Like the glow of a birthday candle snuffed out.  There was just ... _nothing_ ... where there used to be love and warmth and _home_.

They were upside down, hanging from their seatbelts.  But it was just his dad and him.  Clint couldn’t feel his mom at all.

It took him a long moment to realize he was screaming.

It wasn’t until he felt the sharp spike of pain from his dad, as the man gained conscious thought, that it occurred to him to even check on his dad.  He stopped screaming immediately, though tears were still flowing out of his eyes steadily, tracking a wet path across his temples and dropping to the roof of the car.

“Dad?”

“Clint...” his dad mumbled, sounding sleepy.  He didn’t feel right.  He felt weak, like Barney had gotten when he was really sick with pneumonia the previous year.

“Dad?” he tried again.  “Dad?”

He wanted to start screaming again, but he could feel the fear his dad was trying to push down.  His dad was worrying about him.  About mom.

“Clint, it’s ... we’re gonna be okay ...” his dad struggled to say, his words running into each other.

For the first and only time, Clint knew what his dad felt like when he lied.

“Love you, kiddo ...”

Clint choked on his reply when he felt his dad fall asleep.  He started sobbing again.

He focused on his dad, practically grabbing at his thoughts, thready and weak, trying to keep him there.  He wouldn’t let go.

There were people crouching by the car’s windows now, calling out, asking if everyone was all right.  Clint ignored them, trying to keep a hold of his dad.  But he felt his tenuous grasp start to slip.  And then all the reaching in the world could not have caught his dad as he too was snuffed out.

The waves of adrenaline and fear and sympathy pouring in from outside the vehicle did nothing to help assuage Clint’s fear at the realization that he was _alone_.

He didn’t stop screaming until the paramedics came and put him to sleep.

 

 

**                 Two: **

At the circus, no one lives forever.  Most times, no one lives for even very long according to normal standards.  The food is sub-par, the water isn’t always clean, and the daily muck and grime tends to be hard to wash off.  And that was just the normal things.  Circuses came together with feats of daring, and wild animals, and sharp or flaming objects too.

But Clint didn’t think about that when Barney told him they were breaking out of the foster home.

His only thoughts were of adventure and of _freedom_.  The other kids in the foster home—his and Barney’s _fourth_ in as many months—had started to look at him funny.  It had been just like the last three homes before it.  And the seventeen before them.

The kids in the foster homes always started with glances over their shoulders at Clint.  Avoidances of meeting Clint’s eyes, but quick shuddering looks to check for where he was in the room.

In the other homes, those looks had progressed to name-calling, and then to shoves.  Barney had always cut in when things got physical, and sometimes before, but Clint could feel how tired Barney was becoming of being labeled the ‘child with anger issues’ by the adults.  He could tell his brother was starting to consider simply _not_ coming to Clint’s rescue.

So Carson’s Carnival of Traveling Wonders was a welcome change.  And Clint decided to work on his independence, so that he could prove to Barney that he wasn’t a burden, that he could take care of himself.

Barney’s first job at Carson’s Carnival was to muck out the horse stalls.  But Clint was only thirteen and still waiting on a growth spurt.  Most of the animals were huge compared to him, and the tools for caring for them almost equally so.  So he got the job of handing water and towels to the performers after each act.  For almost every act, he hung around just out of view of the main crowds, with buckets of water and little cups, waiting for the performers to hurry by on their way back to their tents.  But whenever he lion tamer was performing, Clint moved close to watch.  It was fascinating, watching how Mr. Anatoria cracked his whip and feeling his strong assurance that he was perfectly safe from the beast locked in the cage with him.

Clint had never seen anything like it before.  It was a boldness and a courage he hoped to one day possess within himself.  He wanted to stop being afraid.  He was so afraid of people.  He was scared that if he let himself spend time around them, to start to lean on their feelings and rest in their adrenaline, that he would be hurt when they left him.  He would have given almost anything to just give up that crippling fear.  So that he could prove to Barney that he wasn’t an annoying kid anymore.

So every night, he watched the lion tamer, and tried to learn from him.  He waited for any glimpse of fear to fall from the man’s heart.  He waited to see if the man had really and truly conquered his own fear.  The man always claimed that he had trained his lion well.  Sasha, she was named.  Mr. Antoria had raised her from a cub.  He claimed that everything the audience saw in the act was a performance, not reality.  Sasha had been taught to growl menacingly, and to slash her claws at him, but she had been taught not to scratch him.

So the man had no fear.

None.

Night after night, Clint’s fingernails bit into his legs as he sat and watched the show.  And he reveled in Mr. Antoria’s ease and comfort, as he cracked his whip and brandished his chair.

And then came that night, almost three months in to Clint and Barney’s time with the Carson’s.  Clint would never be sure if Mr. Antoria lost his balance, or if Sasha lunged too far with her claws, or if it had even truly been an accident on Sasha’s part.  But it happened.

Clint was sitting close enough to hear Mr. Antoria’s blood hit the ground just before his body did.

Clint’s eyes were clenched tight before the man landed though, because he was trying to hold back the scream that was fighting its way up the back of his throat.  Because almost as soon as the claws had connected, he knew the man was dead.  Mr. Antoria barely even had time to feel the fear that he normally would have ignored.  One second he was performing, with emotions as stead as always, the next, he gave out a weak gasp and then ... nothing.

Clint curled up into a tiny ball where he was sitting, trying desperately to ignore the empty shell that lay some twenty-five feet away from him.  Maybe if he focused on the shock and the fear from the crowd around him, he could forget the emptiness that was pervading his senses.

That was the first night the Swordsman really took notice of him.  The man, with his sharp emotions, was a welcome island in the sea of emptiness that was Mr. Antoria now.  The Swordsman gathered Clint up from where he was sitting, announcing that the next act (his own) was cancelled until they could clean up the mess in the cage.  He was blunt and he was unbending, and Clint clung to the firm coldness that he felt from the man, because anything was better than holding on to that cursed emptiness.

The Swordsman took him outside the tent and through the push of the crowd escaping the same tragedy.  He took Clint back to his own tent, and began asking if he would like to learn how to use a sword.  Clint would have been tempted by any distraction at that point.  So he took the man up on his offer.  And that was how he found himself a mentor.

Clint never watched Mr. Benari when the man replaced Mr. Antoria as the lion tamer.

 

 

**                 Three: **

With Trick Shot and the Swordsman, Clint took comfort in the fact that he would never lean on their feelings for any positive reason.  Their emotions were hard and biting, angry as they snapped at anyone within their close vicinities.  He knew that he would never come to rely on their feelings to hold him together, because they never gave him any relief.  They only gave an extra weight.

Oftentimes after training, he would feel relief to escape their presence, because he could breathe lighter once he was alone.

And that was where he gained his solace.  For once it felt better to be alone than to have other’s emotions coursing through his veins.  So he welcomed the pain, knowing it would feel better to find solitude later.

With all of the darkness in their souls though, he never quite expected them to be murderers.  And if he did consider that idea for vague and short moments in time, he never expected them to kill.  Except they did.

The first time he witnessed it, they killed for him.  An acquaintance they both knew had come to visit Carson’s.  Clint had never seen the man before, but even the first time he stepped within a few feet of distance from the man, he felt the oozing darkness coming off of the man.

The man stayed for three days.  He always seemed to be watching Clint, too.  And it made Clint’s skin crawl to feel what that man felt.

One the third night, Clint was pulled from his sleep by the feeling of _wrong_ and _disgust_ to find the man in his tent.  He tried to entice Clint to leave Carson’s with him—to run away.  And when that didn’t work, he bound Clint’s wrists and began dragging him out of the tent.

Except the Swordsman and Trick Shot were waiting.  And the man was snuffed out before Clint even realized who had stopped their progress from the tent.

They laughed when the man hit the ground.

Clint didn’t fight the black spots clouding his vision.  He was almost fourteen years old at the time.  It wouldn’t be the first time he would watch them kill someone and be unable to stop it.

 

 

**                 Four: **

His first kill was not a pleasant one.  No kill he ever took would be, but the first was especially horrifying.

He was only twenty-two, and a runaway from the circus, trying to escape the assassins Trick Shot had sent after him.  Trick Shot was after blood, saying that Clint owed him a debt that couldn’t otherwise be paid.  So Clint was running for his life in a foreign country, no idea how to speak the language or even how to find his way to the nearest border.

It was only a matter of time until he was caught, really.  His bow was broken, thanks to a run-in with the last round of assassins he’d had to fight off.  One ankle was sprained.  His ribs were aching with every ragged breath he dragged in.  And he was pretty sure he had a concussion.

He was making his way through a narrow alley.  He never saw the man who hit him from behind.

He woke in a cell.  It was a room barely bigger than a closet, with one tiny window high above his head.  There was a man standing over him, with a sharp grin and a monologue about how much Trick Shot was going to pay him when he brought Clint back to him in multiple boxes.

Clint was terrified, and he reacted without thinking.  The fight wasn’t long, but it was hard.  It ended with Clint bashing the man’s head against the wall.

He didn’t mean to kill the man.  He really didn’t.

But by the time he felt the man’s light start to give, it was too late.  This soul, he had snuffed out with his own bare hands.

He collapsed on the ground on the other side of the cell from the body, chest heaving in an attempt to breathe normally, but ribs aching with every shift.  He knew vaguely that he was shaking, and not just from adrenaline.  But he couldn’t focus on himself.  Not on his aching muscles or the new cuts the assassin had left on his flesh.

He was alone in the cell with an empty body.

He cried.

 

 

**                 Five: **

His first assassination under SHIELD was (fortunately) not his first mission with Coulson.  He felt sure to this day that if it had been Coulson’s op, Clint might have never gone back out into the field again.

He had killed multiple men throughout his years as a criminal.  But now he was on the good side, he told himself.  Now he could do some good.  So why was he sitting on a roof, preparing to put a bullet through someone’s head?

The man was standing with his underlings, waiting for the call from the undercover SHIELD agent.  Clint couldn’t feel him from here.  He was almost 200 yards away, and Clint had never felt anyone from that distance except for Barney, and only when his brother was feeling a very strong emotion.

Clint knew if he got the order to shoot, he wouldn’t feel it when the man died.  But he could imagine it.  He knew how it would feel.

_“Take the shot, Specialist.”_

For a moment, he hesitated, because his hands were starting to shake.

_“Barton!”_

He coughed, just for something to do, to hesitate longer.  “But Sir—”

_“Take the damn shot!  He’s moving!”_

Clint tracked the man’s movement out of habit.  He pulled the trigger before he could let himself think about it any longer.

It was a clean shot, as planned.

He watched for just long enough to see that the man was down.

“Target down,” he said through clenched teeth.

 _“Confirmed,”_ another voice replied, another undercover agent murmured through the line, as he pretended to be horrified about the death of a comrade.

_“All right, Specialist—”_

Clint turned off his comm, ignoring the last orders his handler had been about to give him.  He needed a moment.

As always, when he took a life, he made himself sit there for a long moment, enduring the consequence of his shot.  He let himself mourn for the loss of a soul, snuffed out by his own hand.  He mourned for the family he had just affected.

He threw up.  Because he was supposed to be a good guy now.

Then he packed up the SHIELD commissioned sniper rifle, and slipped away.  He didn’t return to SHIELD HQ for almost a week.  In that time, he was given a new handler, a second “last chance” to prove himself to the agency, and the beginnings of a bad rep that he would follow him for the most of his SHIELD career.

 

 

**                 One: **

He still dreamed about it.  That terrifying emptiness, when he had flung himself from the Shwarma shop all the way back to the Hellicarrier in search of Coulson.  _Dead_ , Stark had proclaimed, his eulogy cut short by Clint tucking into himself as he simultaneously threw his reach out farther than he had ever thought possible.

The Hellicarrier was more than 200 yards away.  It was at least 500 yards, maybe more.

But that hadn’t mattered.  He had used every stray emotion in his path to piggyback on, and to gain strength from, and to use as he rushed for the Hellicarrier.

He mostly dreams of those horrible first minutes, when he passed through the Hellicarrier, searching blindly for Coulson.  He remembers grasping at familiar people—Sitwell, Dr. McKinley, Hill.  He was searching for anyone near Coulson.

It took him a moment to find Fury.  But the worry and dread Fury was feeling—the balance scale that was tipping from resignation to a steely hope—that was where he stopped.  Because he recognized the tone of those emotions.  Fury cared for this agent.  And everyone knew Fury only honest-to-god _cared_ about a few agents.

So Clint waited.

And in his dreams, nothing happened.  They just waited.  Forever.

Or Fury’s mood dropped into resignation, as he realized his agent wasn’t coming back.  And the doctors that were swarming the area and talking a mile a minute suddenly all stopped, to take a moment and mourn the passing of a great agent.  The only handler who ever left baked goods after one of his specialists escaped their care.

Or he was yanked back to his body by the Avengers, and he missed it—missed Coulson literally _coming alive again_.

In those last dreams, Coulson never stayed alive.  Because Clint wasn’t there to grab his soul when it stuttered.  Clint tried not to glare at the rest of the team on the mornings after those dreams.  But he couldn’t always help it.  He had to repeatedly remind himself that they hadn’t been able to reach him.  Natasha had kept them away from him, knowing what he was doing and doggedly believing he needed to confirm the truth for himself.

This night was a new dream.  This night, he dreamed that he had reached the Hellicarrier, and that he had found Fury and the doctors swarming and realized what it meant.  But when he felt that explosion of Phil—suddenly there where he hadn’t been before—he grabbed for the man, but wasn’t able to get a good hold.  He struggled to grasp at Coulson, fingers curling around the man, but slipping immediately.  Like Coulson was just a cloud, sifting through his hands.

He was there and then gone.  Snuffed out like all the rest.

Clint was shaken awake by a familiar hand, worry and sympathy and _love_ wrapping firmly around him as a warm weight settled on top of his left side and shoulder.  A forehead tucked itself in against Clint’s neck.

Clint felt the body half covering his shudder like it had just been pulled in from the snow.

“ _Clint_...”

He felt himself begin to shake, not really fighting hard to keep the tears at bay.  He could feel Phil beside him, hurting for him— _with him_.

“God, Clint...” Phil gasped into his neck.  “I could feel you in my own dream.  It woke me up it was so bad.”

Clint didn’t know what to say.  But then, he didn’t really have to.  Ever since the Hellicarrier, Phil had been able to feel Clint a little, like Clint felt him.  They had been practicing, testing Phil’s range and whether it helped if Clint was trying to share a feeling with Phil.

Almost a year after the Chitauri attack now, Phil was very in-tune with Clint, though he would probably never have quite the same range as Clint.  This was the first time Phil had ever felt him while they were both asleep though.

But it wasn’t the first time he had dealt with Clint’s nightmares from that day.

Phil clung to Clint, focusing all his thoughts on how relieved he was that they were together.  On how happy he was that Clint had found him.  On his own memories of that instant when the doctors got his heart beating again—when he could have sworn for a brief mostly-unconscious moment that Clint had been in the room with him, urging him to be okay.

Phil poured out what comfort he could, any and all that he had.

And slowly Clint soaked it up, floating in it at first, and simply radiating relief back at Phil.

Relief that it had just been a dream.  Relief that Phil had seemed to cling to him almost as hard as he had clutched at Phil that day on the Hellicarrier.  Relief that Phil could feel him now too.  Relief that he wasn’t alone.

Phil began talking to him, barely a murmur of sound, but Clint could hear it over his own ragged breath as clearly as if it had been through a comm line in his ear.  Phil talked for a long time, until Clint’s heart rate slowed, and until he was no longer feeling the fear and shock and sadness that had seemingly been slicing into his very being.  Patiently, Phil helped Clint push away the dream and pull himself back together.

And neither was alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Dang that hurt to write! *whimper* I need a Coulson!cuddle too...! :( Now I really want to write their wedding or something, with both of them leaking happy feelings all over the place and grinning like they'll never stop!


End file.
